Wednesday, December 28, 2011

My uncle, a senior executive in a PSU, was at my home for
Christmas and he introduced me to an important management adage: “What cannot be
measured cannot be managed”.

klout.com is a social media analytics company which measures
influence of users in the social networking world. To put it simply, it checks
out your profiles on twitter, facebook, google+ etc to come up with a popularity score to
measure your social charisma on the web.

If you have not used this yet, then the first thing that you
should do is go to www.klout.com. There you
would need to link all your social networking accounts and see the website
churn out a number. To your surprise, the website can spew out a number with an
accuracy of up to two decimal places.

Klout gives you some more scores namely True Reach,
Amplification and Network Impact. They sift through your social networking
activity and observe the number of retweet, mentions, followers and following
on twitter. As of now it is unclear what they observe in facebook. They have a
bunch of ‘scientists’ and engineers who refine the algorithm which produces the
number.

Fig: A snapshot of my klout profile

Klout has this interesting feature called klout perk. If you are popular enough
and klout identifies you as an expert in a particular field, you might be given
perks by companies who would want you
to use their products. For example, if you are an influencer with tablets,
Amazon might gift you a Kindle Fire so that you might use it and possibly talk
about it on the web (positively or negatively). This is a truly innovative
feature(who minds free goodies :) ).

Inspite of all this, Klout has been under a lot of
criticism. What I find most annoying about these scores is the lack of non-vague
definition for all these terms. For Example, the definition of Amplification
says “Amplification is how much you influence people. It indicates how likely
your audience is to respond and how close you are to your entire network.” My
Amplification score is apparently 37. I have no idea how good it is. I don’t even
know the maximum score possible. The
moment I saw klout report card, I got reminded of indiblogger. Indiblogger is a network of bloggers in
India. They come up with Indirank
every month for all the bloggers in the network. Their blog metric seems much
more reliable as they have measurable
parameters (like alexa rank, google page rank, frequency of posting etc) which
they use to bring out the score. I might not agree with the idea of scoring
blogs on these parameters; however I think they do a good enough job in finding
out the ‘reach’ of each blog.

Another thing which I find irritating in klout is the +k feature. It reminds me of Zynga’s
Mafia War on Facebook. Every day, each user would be given 10 +k points which they can go and
distribute among friends. This is a very non creative way of having user
engagement and might be detrimental in the long run because if you can increase
klout score by spending your time on klout.com(rather than on social networking
sites), it is not a good scoring mechanism then.

Also, klout has only
added facebook, twitter, google plus and
foursquare in their algorithm. Photosharing websites like flickr and Blogging
platforms like blogspot, wordpress etc
have not yet been analysed. These websites are definitely an indicator of a
person’s influence on the web.

Then why has klout received so many eyeballs? For one,
everyone likes numbers. Numbers have an enigmatic pull. How many times have you
felt tempted to click on links which say “10 worst songs of 2011” and the likes?
Klout has used this attraction to the maximum and has got a good user base in a
little time.

Also, klout caters to
a genuine business need. There are a lot of companies which are mulling the ROI
of their efforts in social media marketing. Klout promises to give them a
number which they can use in board rooms to justify to their bosses that the
money spent in social media is showing the desired result. It also promises to
be an effective tool in recruitment process for the social media industry. In
this world of supply and demand, let us see how klout survives.

P.S. - Now that I blogged about klout, will I get some brownie points?

Friday, December 23, 2011

India is changing. If you have any doubt then go to a tier 2 or tier 3 city, visit a mall and see the number of people trying to ride the escalators with mixed feelings of fear and elation.

However, there is a sense of intimidation in all these shopping malls. This feeling is even more prominent in the smaller cities and towns of the country. Even with the burgeoning middle class pockets, the sight and smell of malls and high end shops seem inviting and uninviting both at the same time.

So, when I (a small town boy) went to Croma store, which didnt feel as 'posh' and where one was allowed to play around with the gizmos, I was bound to stumble across something interesting. I moved around in the store fiddling everything that could be fiddled with. Suddenly, I noticed this particular section of the store where all the Bose devices were kept. I had heard a lot about Bose (who hasn't), but had never used any of their products before. When I saw people trying out headphones and speakers at the Bose counter, I thought I should give it a try. I put on one of the headphones. Ecstacy.

What followed was akin to a guy stalking a girl. I would go to Croma store again and again to test the device to convince myself that the hefty price tag was worth every penny. Finally I decided to buy the thing.

However, when it came to buying the headphones, I decided to search for an exclusive store and was surprised to know that they had one in Forum Mall. On my previous visits to Forum, this showroom of Bose was nothing but invisible.

Premier Companies, take a cue. Keep the fancy showrooms in expensive malls, but your customers (the new ones) are not going to find you there if you don't 'open up'.Consumer electronics stores are seeing a transformation. Lets see where it goes from here.